‘With Bingo nothing was planned’

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: The launch of Bingo represents ITC Foods’ fifth major line of business after the highly successful staples, biscuits, ready-to-eat and confectionery products. In just over six months (introduced in the market in March 2007) Bingo has become a case study for FMCG product launches. It demolishes many myths. With this launch, ITC Foods ended up blowing 30-40% of its media budget on new media campaigns—something unheard of in a market where the Internet is used mainly for lead generation and rarely, if ever, for brand-building. In an exclusive interview to FE’s Radhika Sachdev, Ravi Naware, divisional chief executive (foods) ITC, shares his company’s gameplan:

What’s your experience—is the digital media more effective than conventional advertising planks? What metrics do you employ in measuring the impact of such tools?

The metrics obviously would be the number of hits/eyeballs on the portal. We did choose the unconventional way and spent nearly 40% of our media budget on digital media, because we felt this would be the best way to connect with our market. In a way, we did break out of the mould. We used digital media for brand building, which is not what most Indian companies do with this media.

In any case, in the initial few months of a launch of an FMCG product, you do end up spending as much as 80%-100% of your turnover on media purchase. That’s indeed necessary as there could be 300-plus ads hitting consumers every day! In this clutter, we wanted to be dramatically different.

Experts contend that the biggest contributor to Bingo’s scorching pace of growth is its Indianised flavours. How did you crack the complex Indian palate?

Two things were important here. One, consumer insight, which we invested heavily in. We put a lot of resources on finding out what tickled the Indian consumer’s taste bud, what turned him on etc. The second is the manner in which you launch your product, that is the communication/execution part. The distribution strategy also matters a lot in this game.